Airports are funny places; hubs of intense activity, their cold and chaotic order is bound by contradicting sentiments of excitement, frustration, boredom, joy, exhaustion, anticipation, sadness; passengers caught in endless security queues, rushing through duty free shops or perpetually awaiting in concourses and lounges. All this forms the basis for Music For Real Airports, a collaborative project for art galleries soundtracked by The Black Dog, with visual media created by design studio Human, due to be premiered at La Sensoria festival in Sheffield later on this month. The Black Dog collected over two hundred hours of field recordings in various airports while on tour. These were then incorporated into lush atmospheric constructions to render the experience of passing through these thoroughly inhuman bustling nests of modern life.

Unlike Brian Eno’s seminal 1978 work Music For Airports, which was conceived as a soothing four part textural ambient piece destined to be used by airport authorities, the music collected here by Ken Downie and brothers Martin and Richard Dust, although ambient in nature, doesn’t seek to be used in airports, but rather brings a multitude of sonic elements of airport life into the work. Continue Reading »

Over four years have passed between Berliner Jochen Briesen’s debut album as Semuin, Province, in 2005 on Oregon-based imprint Audio Dregs and his second opus, Circles And Elephants, published by German label Ahornfelder at the end of last year. Blending streaks of acoustic instrumentations and electronic textures into refined sonic vignettes, Briesen created on his debut album a pretty imaginative soundtrack.

Circles And Elephant continues on the same wavelength but there is a marked evolution towards more open fields, Briesen’s intricate soundscapes gaining both in breadth and intensity. Continue Reading »